While many retailers saw a boon of sales within the past two years as a result of the increased frequency of online shopping, they also had to deal with a proportionate increase in returns. A sound return policy is what gives customers the confidence to shop with a retailer, but retailers must burden the additional operational costs that are associated with these returns. Despite making the sale first, the return costs can result in retailer’s experiencing an overall loss of revenue. With the help of this post and accompanying infographic, retailers should be able to form some strategies to aid in reducing these losses associated with returns.
One of the first steps to help retailers reduce their rate of returns is by optimizing their product pages on their websites. This doesn’t mean page optimization as much as it means retooling product descriptions and images that are coupled alongside the page. Retailers should always provide customers with precise descriptions and images that more accurately convey the characteristics of a product. The reason behind this is that a customer is more likely to return a product that does not match the descriptions or images provided by the retailer with 100% accuracy. By revisiting these product pages and deleting any misleading images or product details, retailers can avoid additional returns.
When considering the ways in which shipping and return policies play a role in returns, retail organizations greatly benefit from their free shipping and returns policies. Through these policies, customers feel much more comfortable ordering products they know they can safely return for free. What happens a great majority of the time is customers order a product with intent to return it assuming it’s not up to their standards but end up keeping the product instead. This benefits retailers more than just the original sale, as now the customer truly believes what they see is what they get, and they’ll order once again.
As previously mentioned, despite benefiting as a result of more and more customers shopping online, retailers have also had to adjust to additional returns. Nearly unprecedented, retailers have experienced a 70% increase in returns over the past year. Fortunately, some of these returns were either fraudulent or wardrobing and bracketing scam attempts from customers, meaning retailers weren’t at too much of a loss.
Building off of these scam and fraudulent purchases, retailers must be more defended now than ever. Without the right defenses, retailers could be enabling these fraudulent purchases. Most often, these purchases are made on stolen cards and later returned in hopes to launder money from stolen credit cards. Anti-fraud tools can be put in place to help retailers identify which of their customers are attempting to scam them and help the rightful owner of the card have it returned to them.
While retailers are primarily focused on introducing new sales techniques and improving the overall customer experience, they may overlook the correct security measures necessary to defend their business. For more information on these defense mechanisms, in addition to the ways in which your retailer organization can benefit from them, please take a moment to review the infographic included alongside this post. Courtesy of Signature Payments.